Four-Letter Word

by Christa Desir

  The whole interaction was pretty harsh. When I used to spend more time at Eve’s, I always tried to soften the blows of her rudeness. I knew it was just how they were with each other, how they’d always been, but sometimes I felt like Eve didn’t really appreciate what she had. Her mom was really into both of her kids. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like for her to have nothing to show for herself beyond the flair covering her house and her parental involvement in Jamie’s junior high, GHS Boosters, and Eve’s volleyball. Always have something that belongs to just you, Chloe, my mom had told me once when I asked why she opened an organic coffee shop that barely broke even. Don’t co-opt your children’s lives as your own. That will only leave you with nothing when they eventually rebel.

  We followed Eve upstairs, past Jamie’s room with the loud video game sounds spilling out beneath the door, to her room at the end of the hall. She’d had a passive-aggressive fight with her mom over being able to decorate however she wanted, but ultimately relented to her mom’s interior design vision as long as her mom agreed to never clean or tidy it in any way. Which meant that Eve’s room looked like a closet exploded all over Martha Stewart’s “simple bedroom” model. The walls were robin’s-egg blue, and the room had white furniture and little china figurines on various surfaces. And the bookshelf looked perfectly ordered—probably alphabetical—because Eve never read so she didn’t touch it. But there were clothes and makeup and hair stuff everywhere. Nan and Pops would kill me if I kept my room like Eve’s.

  Chloe Donnelly glanced around before pushing a pile of laundry over on a chair and sitting. “You have some amazing clothes. You should hang them up.”

  Eve looked stung but then plopped on the bed and said, “You think my clothes are amazing?”

  Chloe Donnelly nodded and held up a jersey dress. “Yeah. I mean, I saw this dress at Tillys and totally loved it, but they didn’t have my size.”

  Eve lit up. “Did you try online? Grinnell sucks for clothes, obviously, but you can get such good deals online. I have an app that lets me know when certain things are on sale.”

  Eve didn’t used to be so into clothes, not until Holly showed up and they started sharing a wardrobe. It was horribly clichéd, but I was barely holding on to my friendship with Eve so I never said anything about it. Though I couldn’t stop myself from blurting out, That’s how people get lice, when they went through their share-winter-hats phase.

  Chloe Donnelly said, “Yeah. I should do that. Walmart isn’t exactly bursting with fashion options. Though we did get that scarf for Other Chloe.”

  Eve narrowed her eyes and looked at me. Skepticism was written all over her face, and she said, “You bought that?” almost like an accusation. She’d been pissed when I didn’t go back-to-school clothes shopping with her at the end of last summer, but I hated shopping and was too embarrassed to tell her I promised my parents to only buy secondhand because it was better for the environment. Holly shopped with her now.

  Chloe Donnelly twisted her purple-stoned ring and said, “We didn’t buy it. We relieved Walmart of some of its stock, gratis.”

  Eve blinked a few times and I swallowed a snort, which I knew was mean, but sometimes my frustration at her bled out and I wanted her to feel like I did every time I wasn’t included in something. “Huh?” she said.

  “Shoplifting,” Chloe Donnelly explained.

  Eve’s mouth dropped open. “Really?” She swiveled to face me. “You stole something? What was that like?” Her eyes blinked fast with curiosity, and I felt a hundred feet tall. I wanted to lean in and tell her every detail of my afternoon, but I couldn’t in front of Chloe Donnelly, not without looking like I had some sort of girl crush.

  So I said, “Well, technically, I didn’t steal anything.”

  Chloe Donnelly shook her head. “She covered for me. She’s totally badass and subversive. Completely cool about it so the cashier didn’t give us suspicious looks or anything.”

  “It wasn’t really hard,” I admitted.

  Eve scrunched up her face for a second, then said, “Oh. Well, the scarf looks good on you.” Though it sounded a little grudging and maybe jealous. She must have heard the tone in her voice too, because she knocked her knee into mine and said, “Really. I’m not lying. I’ve always said you should show off your face more.”

  Chloe Donnelly leaned forward and fussed with the scarf—touching me again!—and said, “It’s the perfect color, right? That shade of blue totally pops her eyes.”

  It’d been so long since I’d been the subject of such intense speculation that my cheeks burned like they were on fire.

  Eve said, “Yeah, it’s a good color.” I hoped I didn’t look like I’d been chosen for homecoming court, even if that was totally how I felt.

  Chloe Donnelly picked up one of Eve’s bottles of nail polish and shook it. “Manis?”

  For a second I felt like I was in a time warp. We were going to do our nails together. Something Eve used to ask me to do for her. Then she’d flat-iron my hair since my nails weren’t ever long enough to be painted. But it had been almost a year since we’d done that. The grin she gave me made me feel like she remembered how we used to do this too. And for a little while I thought we were going to be okay. Maybe Chloe Donnelly was exactly the thing that would make Eve start really liking me again.

  Eve hopped up from her bed and sat at Chloe Donnelly’s feet, presenting her nails, her dumb BEST FRIENDS charm bracelet slipping down her forearm. “Yes. Fire-engine red, please.”

  Chloe Donnelly looked at me, then at my nails. A small frown appeared between her eyebrows and I tucked my fingers into fists. “We’ll do facials after,” she offered, and I knew she was trying to include me. For the first time in too long, someone wanted to include me. Eve looked between the two of us and smiled.

  “Yeah, facials as soon as we’re done,” she said, and I smiled back.

  Chloe Donnelly twisted the cap off the bright-red nail polish and asked, “So what’s the deal with the girl who miscarried?”

  “She used to be my best friend in junior high,” I blurted. God, why did I have to try so hard? Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  “Really?” Chloe Donnelly asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Eve’s brows furrowed. “Yeah, I forgot about that. You guys hung out a lot.”

  And then we didn’t, and I had Eve. Until Holly. Though maybe I still had Eve a little. “Yeah. But I didn’t know she was pregnant.”

  Eve shuddered. “Me neither. Who do you think the dad is? Some older guy from the college?”

  I wanted to tell them we shouldn’t gossip. I could hear Mateo’s judgment as if he were standing next to me, and I didn’t think it was fair to Melissa, even if I hadn’t really hung out with her in years. But I was too chicken and didn’t want to ruin things with Eve when we were just getting on solid ground again, so instead, I said, “I don’t know. My mom miscarried when I was in eighth grade. Do you remember when I told you about it?”

  Chloe Donnelly looked at me like she was hurt I’d left this fact about my mom out when we’d talked earlier. Not that she could know how tied Mom’s miscarriage was to their decision to join the Spirit Corps. And not that I wanted to talk about that part. I couldn’t really say why I brought the miscarriage up now, except that it felt safer to mention it with Eve there, and it kept me from feeling horrible about gossiping over Melissa.

  “Yeah, I remember,” Eve said with a nod. “You said it was pretty late in the pregnancy, right?”

  I shrugged. “Yeah. Twenty-three weeks. It kind of wrecked her. She made my dad get a vasectomy after that.”

  Chloe Donnelly twisted the cap on the nail polish and leaned forward to touch my shoulder. I wondered if she knew how her touching was almost too much. “I’m sorry. That sucks.”

  “It did,” I said, my voice cracking a little, but I didn’t offer any more.

  She took a breath like she was going to say something, but then untwisted the nail polish and started on Eve’s
nails again.

  “I didn’t know you still thought about all of that,” Eve said to me in a low voice. “You could’ve talked to me about it.”

  “I know.”

  “I thought we didn’t have secrets,” Eve said, and I couldn’t mistake the hurt.

  A million responses flooded my brain, but I bit my tongue on them. Eve and I didn’t used to have secrets, but now it seemed like she and Holly had tons of them, always whispering in the halls and doing that thing where they stop talking when I walk up to them. Their special charm bracelets they’d gotten over spring break making me feel like I was never invited to the party when it came to them.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  “Eve,” Chloe Donnelly said, “where do you keep your facial stuff? I’m going to teach Other Chloe a guaranteed acne-prevention trick.”

  I tried to smile at her, I tried to be appreciative of what she was doing for me, but I couldn’t help feeling crappy about needing acne prevention, in the same way I felt crappy about not being able to do manicures.

  “Actually, I’m going to take off. I have to be home for dinner,” I said. I got up and pretended not to see the concerned look on Chloe Donnelly’s face and the slightly stung expression on Eve’s.

  “You sure?” Chloe Donnelly asked.

  “Yep. You guys have fun.”

  Eve’s face changed again, and she waved her painted fingers dismissively like I was an acquaintance who’d stopped by, unnecessary and unimportant. I wished I hadn’t said anything about my mom. Eve had no right to be mad that I didn’t talk to her about how much the miscarriage still seemed to cast a shadow over my life. She had only called me one time over winter break when I was with my parents in Burkina Faso, and she’d spent most of that call talking about how she and Holly had gone drunk sledding on cafeteria trays down Hamburger Hill.

  I slipped out of the room, hearing Eve’s whispered, “So tell me what shoplifting is like. How do you do it?” as I shut the door.

  Before I got home, my phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled into Nan and Pops’s driveway and glanced at the text. It was from Chloe Donnelly.

  Thanks for taking me to Walmart today. It was totally pink. Let’s do facials sometime later this week, k?

  I quickly typed back, Definitely.

  So I apparently had a new friend.

  3

  At school the next day Melissa McGrill was absent. I’d dreamed of her last night, her and Chloe Donnelly. A strange dream where the two of them were sisters and both pregnant. But neither of them wanted their babies and kept doing things to put them at risk, stuff like drinking bleach and punching their stomachs. I woke up sweating and wanting to throw up, with a whisper of my mom’s voice in my ear. We don’t always get what we want, Chloe. But maybe sometimes what we get is the right thing anyway.

  Chloe Donnelly slid in next to me again at the lunch table, this time without pushing me so far over that my butt was half off. She hugged me, and even though her lack of personal space made me feel all kinds of awkward, I could see Eve’s envy when she let me go. Eve was wearing the jersey dress Chloe Donnelly said she wanted, and her fire-engine red fingernails were even more prominent because she had a ring on every finger of her left hand. And, of course, the charm bracelet on her wrist. I shook my head when I saw all of it and shoveled my sandwich into my mouth so I wouldn’t say anything stupid. Holly showed up five minutes later, slamming her tray down and shoving Eve over on the bench. Only Holly could look pretty when she was pissed. As if anger was just another pose she’d practiced in dance.

  “What’s up?” Eve asked.

  “Coach decided we couldn’t do my routine at the dance show because she’s worried it’s too provocative. There’ll be parents there, Holly. As if there haven’t been parents at every football halftime show where we’ve done way more racy stuff than my routine. She’s just being a prude because the principal got a call from a parent who said our routines make us look like strippers and that we’re compromising the values of our town.”

  I shut down my blurting mechanism hard because I didn’t think Holly would appreciate me agreeing that their last halftime routine of the season had resembled a pole/lap dance. I mean, chairs were involved—chairs!

  Chloe Donnelly tsked like some sort of mother hen, then said, “That sucks. Is there any talking your coach into it? Like, do you think maybe you could change some stuff in your routine to make it less racy?”

  “It’s not racy, though,” Holly whined.

  “It’s totally not. I’ve seen it,” Eve added, always so quick to defend Holly. Freshman year, Eve and I had both gone on and on about how dance wasn’t a real sport, no matter how all the girls pretended it was a hard workout. With me having done hockey and Eve on volleyball, we both had seen plenty of bruises, and dance seemed soft in comparison. But as soon as Holly started at GHS and made the team, Eve changed her mind, telling me I was part of the problem, whatever that meant.

  “I’m sure it’s not bad, but this is small-town Iowa, Holls.” Holls? “Maybe you can do your routine for me after school and I can help come up with some suggestions?” Chloe Donnelly said.

  Eve got all fidgety with excitement. “Wait. Do you dance? Because you could probably do dance team. I’ve been to a lot of their practices. They could use more good dancers.”

  For a minute Holly’s face flashed hurt. Then she looked at Eve how she always looked at me—like she was playing chicken on a tractor and was ready to gun it—but before she could say some snippy thing about Eve not knowing jack about dance, Chloe Donnelly said, “Oh God, no. I don’t know how to dance like Holly, I’m sure. I just had a friend at the Academy for the Arts in Chicago, and she showed me how to switch up things so you could make dances be more PG. It’s only an offer to help.”

  Holly glanced between Eve and Chloe Donnelly, as if she were calculating, then said, “Sure. I mean, like I said, it’s really not racy, but if you want to come see us practice, you totally can.”

  Chloe Donnelly made this approving noise in her throat, and suddenly the sandwich I was eating tasted of cardboard and mayonnaise. I wanted to stomp my foot and say Chloe Donnelly was my friend, but I knew I couldn’t, and I felt dumb for even thinking it.

  “I’d love to come see you guys. It’ll be totally pink,” Chloe Donnelly said, then turned to me. “We should all do pizza afterward.”

  “We could go to Beau’s,” I said. Blurted. Mateo worked at Beauregard’s in town and the built-in excuse of seeing him while I was with my friends—friend?—was too good to resist.

  Eve rolled her eyes. She was well acquainted with my frequent drive-bys of Beau’s to see if Mateo was working. But Chloe Donnelly said, “Yeah, sure, whatever. We’ll text you when we’re headed over. Eve, will you come to watch the dance team with me?”

  Eve put on a pouty frown, the same one I’d seen her use with her dad whenever he told her she needed to get homework done before she went out for the night. “I can’t. I have to meet with Mr. Meyers about some missing English assignments.”

  “Come after.” Chloe Donnelly leaned forward and squeezed her hand. Eve shifted. Maybe she thought this girl was a little overly touchy too.

  But maybe not, because then Eve smiled and said, “Yeah. Sure. Of course.”

  * * *

  I got to Spanish class early, but Chloe Donnelly was already in my seat talking to Mateo. His face was as unemotional and guarded as always, and his hair looked floppy and a little damp, like he’d actually taken a shower after gym class, unlike most of the guys in our school. She said something as I approached and then laughed, brushing her ring-covered hand against Mateo’s forearm. He moved his arm back and smiled at me. Well, half smiled, maybe.

  “Hey. Chloe.”

  “Hey, Mateo. Hey, Chloe.”

  “Other Chloe. I was just telling Mateo how you stole a scarf from Walmart yesterday.”

  Mateo’s mouth dipped a bit, and I blurted, “I didn’t. I mean, not really. Chloe stole it. I w
as just there with her. Walmart sells a lot of guns, did you know? And they’re horrible to their employees.”

  I dropped into the seat on Chloe Donnelly’s other side. There was an awkward silence between us before Mateo said, “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “It’s true.”

  He did the eyebrow-raise thing. “Probably you shouldn’t trust everything you hear or read. That sounds like a fake internet story.”

  My cheeks heated and I dropped my head so my hair fell in front of my face. Dang. I knew all those liberal college students wouldn’t shop there all the time if it were as bad as Chloe Donnelly said. Crap. Crap, crap, crap. I swallowed and shifted in my seat before finally mumbling, “Yeah. I guess you’re right. It was stupid.”

  “Don’t let him make you feel bad, Other Chloe. It was an act of subversiveness. And Walmart totally sucks. Your parents would be proud.” She pulled my desk closer to hers and her fingers dug into my forearm a little. Not hard so much as a reminder that we did it together. But somehow our subversive act seemed a little stupid today, babyish.

  Señor Williams entered and called Chloe Donnelly to the front to speak with him for a minute. He was frowning and held out his attendance book. I turned to Mateo. “I usually only shop at thrift stores. Actually, I don’t really shop. I’ll pay for the scarf. It was not cool.”

  Mateo shrugged. “Not really my business.”

  “Still.” I wanted to lean all the way over and touch his forearm too. So much. But I wasn’t Chloe Donnelly. “I know better. Punishing Walmart really just punishes the employees.”

  Mateo smiled a little, the lip ring moving in this distracting way, and my stomach flip-flopped. “Yeah. At least you get that.”

  Chloe Donnelly was laughing at the front and Señor Williams had on a face like he’d just won Teacher of the Year. I strained to hear what they were talking about, but all I caught was him saying, “It’s fine. Just try to get it cleared up soon so I don’t keep getting flak from the administration.”

  Then the bell rang and we were trapped in a forty-seven-minute discussion with Señor Williams about this weird magical realism movie we saw called The House of the Spirits. A discussion we had all in Spanish. I glanced at Chloe Donnelly a few times during class, but she was twisting her rings and didn’t seem to be paying much attention. I wondered how much Spanish she actually knew or if she was ignoring everything because she hadn’t watched the movie. It didn’t matter; Señor Williams liked her well enough. My brain hurt by the time class ended, and I couldn’t pull myself together quick enough to do anything but wave good-bye to Mateo as he bolted from the room.